[Foundation-l] Positive mention of Wikimedia sites in a web privacy study:

[Dennis During]

I would so much like it if we had aggregate statistics about our users and
their behavior while retaining our exemplary privacy culture.

At Wiktionary it seems to me that the absence of statistics about users,
especially anons, seems to lead us to a culture of serving ourselves rather
than users, not in the largest matters, but in countless small matters of
entry layout, subsidiary entries, help etc.  This is not to evil motives. It
is mostly due to the active editors defaulting to using themselves as models
of the typical user.  The ability of experienced users to customize makes
the practice quite ridiculous.  Our efforts to solicit feedback give us a
view of users the bias of which is uncalibrated.

On Tue, Aug 11, 2009 at 6:03 PM, Brion Vibber <brion at wikimedia.org> wrote:

> On 8/11/09 2:13 PM, Gregory Maxwell wrote:
> > Kudos to the WMF for avoiding gratuitous reader tracking.  Other
> > people *are* paying attention to the privacy implications of this kind
> > of user-invisible behavior.
>
> Yay!
>
> Quick note: the only sort of user tracking that we would be interested
> in doing is to get aggregate information about activity habits.
>
> We wouldn't want to record which pages a given visitor sees, but it
> could be very useful to know that X% of visitors click on N pages per
> session, or that Y% of folks tend to give up if a page takes more than Z
> seconds to load. As long as we can do this without creepy big-brother
> databases of Everything You Do, this shouldn't infringe on anybody's
> privacy.
>
> Of course the default assumption with any sort of long-term tracking
> cookie is going to be that Evil Is Afoot(TM), so we'd want to keep
> things looking squeaky clean as well: if we use tracking cookies for
> statistical purpose they're more likely to be per-session cookies, not
> permanent ones, and we would never use sneaky techniques to hide them
> from users.
>
> -- brion
>
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-- 
Dennis C. During

Cynolatry is tolerant so long as the dog is not denied an equal divinity
with the deities of other faiths. - Ambrose Bierce

http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/cynolatry